CouchDB-hosted apps and authentication

[Ryan Duffield <du...@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

I've been using CouchDB for a few months now, but mostly through
couchdb-python.  I've been very intrigued by the notion of hosting
applications directly in CouchDB itself, effectively creating a pure
HTML/Javascript application.  I understand how to do this for the most part,
but I'm curious as to how this works with authentication.

I have my own ideas about storing basic User documents, creating views to
check against those, and using cookies that the Javascript can access;
however, I'm interested in any sort of best practices that may have emerged
from similar work.  Ultimately and as a possible secondary question, I'd be
really interested in somehow tying in something like RPX (http://rpxnow.com)
into a CouchDB application but I'm not even sure where to start (maybe
action servers?).

Any guidance on the above would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Ryan